


happiness is a dream

by Noip13



Category: Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Character Study, F/F, Fat Shaming, Femslash, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, Jewish Character, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 03:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16526276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noip13/pseuds/Noip13
Summary: Misfortune follows Martha Dunnstock like a shadow.Or, five times Martha Dunnstock wasn't really okay, and one time she sorta was. Except not, exactly, in that order.





	happiness is a dream

1.

It starts like this: Martha Dunnstock is born Martha Stanway in the nicest part of May, one month and two days premature, deep in the wildest depths of Ohio. She comes into the world at Hillcrest Hospital, the child of a loving twenty-year-old hairdresser mother and no father. There is no father because Lacie Stanway was widowed recently, when her husband was mugged walking back to their apartment. The mugger had a knife, and things took a turn for the worse. Mr. Stanway was supposed to graduate from community college in May--one semester early--with a 3.8 GPA, a bachelor’s degree in business, and two job offers. Between that and a baby on the way, things had been looking up.

But now, instead of spending May splitting her free time between attending a college graduation and continuing her journey to find the most cost-effective baby supplies a family could buy, Lacie Stanway is mostly trying to get through the day.

What’s important is that this all builds to one night a week after her husband’s death. A shell-shocked Lacie is pouring over papers in her kitchen, too exhausted and cried-out to weep anymore. She's simply trying to figure out how to scrape together enough money for a plot of land and a half-way decent funeral. 

That’s when there’s an audible pop. She feels a sudden dampness in her maternity pants. She’s blank for a second, not sure what this is, but it hits her like a sledgehammer--even though it’s way, way too early, and obviously, this is a big mistake, it can’t be happening, officer. Terrified, she shouts. Her sister, Joy, rushes out of the bathroom, shaking water off of her fingertips.

“Lacie?” she asks as she slides into Lacie’s tiny kitchen.

“The baby,” Lacie hisses. “My goddamn water just broke.” 

Joy freezes with horror for one long second. Then, she rushes to help Lacie out of her chair. They’re at the hospital--for Lacie, it’s the second time this month--in thirty painstaking minutes. Soon, Lacie is on the table, teeth gritted, scared and in pain. Something’s wrong--the baby’s coming out poorly, of course, as if things weren’t already bad enough. Little Martha is stuck. 

The doctors give her endless advice that she fruitlessly tries to follow. Joy holds her hand with one hand, and with the other, fingers the Hand of God she wears around her neck as she alternates between an endless stream of encouragements and every prayer she can think of.

At one point, she even starts singing the _Mi Sheberakh,_ which as a prayer for the ill wasn’t exactly what most people would probably sing to someone in labor, but it's soothing and sweet and Lacie’s favorite. To Lacie, it feels frighteningly applicable at the moment. She listens, as her sister shaped the old, old sounds, and is able to think for just a moment, through pain so intense that it feels like she's being split in half. She uses the energy to tag an _amen_ on at the end, and send out a prayer of her own for good measure:

_God, I still can’t believe you took my Marty. Please, give me this. She hasn’t seen anything._

It’s the most painful, tense four hours of Lacie’s life. At one point, Joy says, “You can make it, Lacie, and your kid can, too, if she’s anything like her mom.” Lacie takes that and holds it close, loops the words around her torso and over her arms like a life jacket. She buckles the jacket and pushes like the doctors say for the life that depends on it, and so Martha Stanway is born one month and two days premature, but she is born.

Martha spends two weeks at the hospital in emergency care. It’s nail-biting, touch and go, and it’s a good thing Lacie and Marty Stanway had scraped enough money together to pay for insurance, or there’s no way Lacie’d be able to begin to afford it. But at the end of three weeks of praying and breathing and a funeral that Marty’s family has to take care of, Martha’s home, safe and sound.

Joy goes back to live with Mom and Dad after a month or two--they’re sort of bastards, but they can support her a heck of a lot better than Lacie can, Joy’s only seventeen and school starts up again in September--and Lacie splits her time between Martha and working harder than she ever has in her life. And it’s hard, so very hard, and she never has enough time for her daughter, but Martha celebrates six months alive with her baby cheeks chubby and pink, and a new toy from Baby’s R Us in place of everything Lacie wishes she could give her. Because Lacie loves her daughter so damn much, and she pours every ounce of love she had for Marty into Martha, too, and hopefully, that’s enough. 

When Martha is seven months old, Lacie is hit by a truck on a strangely warm and breezy December day while she walks home from work. She forgets to look left and right before crossing and it’s bright and the sun glints off the rapidly-melting snow and the driver and, and, and…in the end, it doesn’t matter except for the fact that Martha is seven months old and an orphan, and no one in the family has enough money to take her. Marty’s family is a bunch of abusive assholes that he cut off all communication with years before he met Lacie, and Lacie’s family...well, it’s far from perfect, but they try, they really do. But between bad luck and Joy’s medication and no money to speak of, Martha Stanway ends up in the foster system.

She’s bounced around a few failing orphanages, before finally being sent to Ohio’s shiny new state orphanage. She’s barely more than a year old. At that age, no one minds if a baby’s chubby. It’s cute. So it isn’t long before a smiling young couple picks her out of the lineup and takes her home, and from then on, she’s Martha Dunnstock.

(Martha doesn’t find out she was an adopted until she’s seventeen and her parents judge her ready to learn the truth. She’s not. Things are hard enough as it is, and if it’s not the final straw, it certainly doesn’t help. Her mom and dad drive to the other end of the state so she can meet her new, _other_ aunt and grandparents, and she wants to like them, but she can’t. She just can’t. They tell her how much they wanted to keep her, how happy they are that she found such lovely parents, and she just wants to ask them why they didn’t try harder. Maybe it would have sucked to live with them. But it couldn’t be much worse than Westerberg, which is barely survivable as it is. Maybe she could have been happy in Mayview. It’s a potential for a whole other, better life, the biggest what-if she’ll ever know, and the thought of it tears her apart.) 

Martha’s new parents are fairly popular around town, and have a number of friends. And the Sawyers--”a perfectly lovely couple, but kind or empty-headed,” she hears her mom whisper to her dad when she’s eight, and she’ll never forget how disdainful her mother sounded at that moment, how such a kind woman could say things behind each others backs and smile so sweetly to the same faces--just so happened to have had a baby girl last year. Veronica. 

Martha and Veronica grow up together, and it’s the most natural thing in the world. Martha likes Veronica. Veronica’s smart but not cruel, quiet but not silent, and very agreeable, but with a pinch of a positively twisted sense of humor. She’s fun and funny, and Martha is happy to have her. Happy to make friendship bracelets with her, to take naps next to her, to eat and cry and run with her.

Kindergarten, looking back, was so incredibly simple. 

* * *

2.

Martha doesn’t hate the Heathers; she just wishes they were nicer. She doesn’t hate the boys who bully her--in fact, she loves one of them. She just wishes they would leave her alone. She doesn’t hate her old family who abandoned her or her old parents for dying or her normal family for being so helpless to make life any easier for her. She just wishes things, just once, could go her way without a cruel twist. Martha is not a hateful person, and sees little point in hating other people. There’s only one thing Martha really hates: Being fat.

Fat is hard to lose and harder to keep off, Martha doesn’t really know when she started gaining so much weight, only that it piled on pound by invisible pound, until people stopped calling her “weird’ and started calling her “thunder thighs” or “fatso” or “wide-load” or “piggy” or...well, there are a thousand names to serve as punishment to anyone who commits the ultimate sin of being fat, and Martha hears them all, over year after year.

She learns to hate the sight of herself in the mirror, and constantly avoids it. She’d like to cut her hair short in the summer, but her mother tells her she needs to keep her hair long to balance out her face. She likes her pretty, comfortable, convenient unicorn sweatshirt and jeans, even if people think they're dorky and that her ponytail is unfashionable--it's a uniform that says who she is as much as sleek suits and shoulder pads make the Heathers the Heathers--but sometimes she’d also like to wear clothes that show skin, like the other girls. But they always look stupid on her.

She’d like to do a lot of things, but something always gets in the way. She tries dieting, but she doesn’t have the self-control. She tries exercising, but she just ends up eating more to compensate. 

Her parents don’t really criticize her for her weight. They say things like “you’d be able to shop at that store if you lost a few pounds” or “you’d be so pretty if you just lost some weight”. Somehow, it doesn't feel any better than what she hears at school, and Martha almost doesn’t want to lose the weight to spite them. But of course she does. But she’s so bad at it...and every time she diets, she rebounds so quickly…Martha can’t lose weight. But that doesn’t mean she can’t join everyone else in hating herself for being fat and so very weak.

* * *

3.

Martha has never thought being popular was especially important. It would be beautiful if people could be a little nicer--it’s not like Martha’s ever done anything to them, other than exist--but as long as she has Veronica, Martha can shut her ears to the worst of it.

Someday, Martha might tell Veronica how much their friendship means to her. It’s a little embarrassing, though, so maybe not today.

* * *

4. 

When Martha is seventeen, people start dropping dead. It starts with Heather Chandler, the most perfectly put-together, sharpest, most vicious girl Martha has ever met. When she hears the news, she feels awful. Suicide. That’s terrible. Heather was horrible...but killing yourself? That’s…

(The suicide note, Martha thinks, though, doesn’t sound like Heather. If Heather really did have such deep-seated loathing for herself, Martha would have thought she would have known. Martha’s good at sensing that kind of stuff. Kindred spirits, and all that. But it’s a note that turns her into a good person, and the police declare that everything’s legit, anyway, so Martha nods and chastises herself not to judge so quickly. 

 _Quickly? I knew her for fourteen years!_ says inner Martha, as disobedient as always. Martha shushes herself. Obviously, that isn’t enough time to know people. After all, Veronica sure was quick to turn on her.)

The next two people are two football players, Kurt and Ram. This one hits Martha harder than Heather, if only because it’s so much more personal--she’s had a hopeless, desperate crush on Ram for years, ever since he kissed her in kindergarten. She wears black for weeks, and cries herself to sleep, and mourns what could have been.

It’s so awful. More than anything, she wishes she could have known. She could have helped. She could have stopped hanging around, waiting for him to admit his feelings for her, and instead, been there for him. If she’d known she didn’t have a chance, she could have let him go. Maybe have been a listening ear.

He could have confided in her, and she could have helped him and his boyfriend, and then...maybe…

He still would have been alive.

 _(That’s why he didn’t love me, I suppose,_ Martha thinks to herself. Heather and Kurt, they were both so good at pushing everything down. Hiding their feelings. She never would have even guessed. She wishes she could have talked to them, helped them, commiserated, the three of them. Maybe they could all have been friends, in another world.)

That isn’t such a bad idea.

* * *

1.

Martha is eighteen, and watching the latest rom-com at the new theater with Veronica. They share an overpriced popcorn, hands brushing against each other as they grab handful after handful from its depths. At the end of the movie, Martha can’t help but cry at the sappy, happy ending as the screen fades to credits. She turns to Veronica, expecting to hear a friendly jab at the tears gathering in her eyes, and the next thing she knows, Veronica’s lips are on hers, and, and--

Veronica pulls away, eyes wide with shock. Suddenly, Martha’s a kindergartener again, freshly-kissed and no idea how to handle it. She hears a little squeak, and realizes, distracted, that it’s her.

“Oh, God, Martha, I don’t know what to-- I’m sorry, I---” Veronica stutters, trying to get it out. Martha works to open her mouth, still shocked.

Veronica takes a breath, then whispers, “I...um...it’s just…”

Martha looks at Veronica, and thinks about the slowly-healing wound that is Ram. She thinks about poor JD, the fifth suicide attempt, the fourth successful one. She thinks about everything that has happened this year, and the miracle of them still both being alive--her, finally almost healed and free from her neck brace, and Veronica, after almost getting caught up in JD’s horrible explosion. She thinks about years of love and loyalty, and the fact that Veronica had it all and had thrown it away, at the end, discarded the shattered remains of the of Westerberg’s popular crowd for her. Had weighed what she’d always wanted and what she already had on a scale and picked Martha’s side.

Martha reaches out and holds Veronica’s hand, and looks at her lips, and thinks, _Maybe._

They kiss there, in the back of the theater, where no one can judge them but God.

So maybe, sometimes, there are happy endings.

* * *

5.

(Martha is twenty when she drops by Veronica’s college for a surprise visit and finds her girlfriend hiding from the world in her single, on the edge of a mental breakdown. Veronica’s scorching her arms inch by inch with a lighter, sobbing hysterically, and when Martha screams and grabs the lighter from her hands, Veronica looks up at her with the kind of deep-seated loathing blazing in her eyes that Martha knows like the back of her hand. Martha confiscates the lighter, runs to wet a towel and wrap it around the burns, and then sits next to the still sobbing Veronica and holds her.

When Veronica’s finished crying, she looks up at Martha with bloodshot, still-blazing eyes. She says, “I have to tell you something,” and her voice is barely a whisper. Then, she tells Martha the secret she has kept shut inside of herself for over three years: She tells her what  _really_ happened in their senior year.

Because for Martha Dunnstock--and, it seems, the thin, beautiful, whip-smart Veronica Sawyer--there might not be such a thing as happy endings, after all.)

**Author's Note:**

> "Happiness is a dream, misfortune is real." --Voltaire
> 
> I have a lot of feelings about this fic, and I've been slow-roasting it for a while. Originally, it was supposed to be about movie!Martha, but I was distracted and had recently heard the musical when I started writing it, so we ended up with musical!Martha....though the reference to Veronica picking Martha over the popular crowd definitely fits more with the movie's ending. Still, sorry, movie Martha. You need more love. :3
> 
> Constructive criticism is welcomed and begged for. Please, tear me apart.
> 
> Check out [my tumblr ](http://noip13.tumblr.com/) if you'd like, for more stuff I write and etc.


End file.
